1.  Water smart cities

Issue: Citizens, infrastructure, and industry must take seriously the need to develop new forms of resilience against climate driven impacts, including extreme events.  A holistic approach for our existing and future cities needs to align both “hard” infrastructure and natural green assets to promote resilience that includes health, wellbeing, and multiple benefits. Sustainable use and management of water can enhance urban resilience in ways that are only just becoming apparent. Potential routes toward more resilient cities might include innovations in flood-proofing, city networks for optimal management, integrating catchment features, construction and the built environment, and new approaches to urban planning.

Ask: Project proposals are invited which will help us to better understand the science of  attenuation features from different perspectives, understanding existing and future water flows in urban environments to underpin effective scale interventions and how to inform effective interventions which may comprise a combination of engineering, policy, planning and community-based approaches to resilience.

2. Integrated land and water management

Issue: Land use is both a source and a sink of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and plays a key role in the exchange of energy and water between the land surface and atmosphere. Land ecosystems  are vulnerable to ongoing climate change as well as more immediate weather and climate extremes, but sustainable land and water management can contribute to reducing the negative impacts of multiple stressors, including climate change, on ecosystems and societies.

Ask: Project proposals are invited which will explore placed-based solutions to land use, change and management of greenhouse gas emission and carbon sequestration. Research (including case studies) that explores an integrated approach to balanced management including novel agricultural systems, restoration of water dominated ecosystems such as peatlands and wetlands, afforestation and habitat improvement including nature-based solutions is invited.

3. Digital water

Issue: Digital water is the proactive management of water networks, using a range of emerging technologies including sensors, AI and machine learning, to provide improved levels of system intelligence, visibility, automation control, and customer service. This can be enhanced when data is shared and easily available to multiple stakeholders.

Ask: Project proposals are invited which explore the potential for new smart technologies and innovations enabled by the Internet of Things to collect real-time information which informs the here-and-now management of water resources.  This can include issues such as predictive technologies for flood assessment, delivering energy and efficiency savings in networks, environmental status and monitoring, benefits to customers, as well as increased awareness and efficiencies in domestic usage.

4.  Water and the circular economy

Issue: There is a pressing need to embed circular economy principles in water management to mitigate against a global water crisis and support a post-COVID green recovery. This includes ensuring that water use efficiency and reuse, energy and resource recovery are optimised, that value is extracted throughout the supply chain, and that initiatives support a “beyond compliance” environmental standard. Concurrently, there is a requirement for both economic and policy evaluation to enable regulatory and policy arrangements to support innovations in the sector.

Ask: Project proposals are invited which explore water and wastewater technologies that promote energy efficiencies. These may include methane and ammonia recovery, hydrogen production, along with wider resource and high-value product recovery, and greenhouse gas emission control. Projects that consider future supply chains and raw material dynamics, cross-sectoral technology and knowledge exchange to other sectors such as food & drink and manufacturing are particularly welcome.

5.  Wildcard - interdisciplinary innovation

Issue: The water cycle is the most important earth system process sustaining life on the planet. New paradigms and interdisciplinary thinking are required to confront the challenges facing this critical, but also vulnerable resource. Innovation thrives at the intersection of science disciplines (biophysical, socio-economic, engineering, law, and medicine), inter-sectoral business knowledge transfer, societal engagement (including education, culture and gender issues), holistic systems thinking, and citizen science.

Ask: Project proposals will be considered which develop interdisciplinary approaches to confront domestic and global water challenges (*Wildcard proposals are limited to a maximum one proposal per lead academic institution).